Uplifters

We are uplifters. Whether we know it or not. Whether we intend to be or not.

Uplifters are those who lift others in life, giving them the desire to have what the uplifters own, which is a favored place in the world. This is because we are a free people, living in a land of prosperity, and we are indued with a sense of moral obligation to help others. After all, who would not wish to be free and prosperous like ourselves?

Yet in reality, those lands whom the uplifters live among, those who are less favored in life, are not always blessed by their interaction with us. Instead, hatred, war and terror can often be the result.

People in every nation have their own unique life, with its powers, talents, customs and taboos.

Someone comes in from an obviously advanced and affluent nation, and the result is almost always upheaval in their culture, however well intentioned the efforts.

From this, there is a division of those who live in the lesser nation. Some of them wish to embrace all that there is about the advanced nation. Others want to destroy the foreigners to protect their culture and their way of life. Even taboos get rewritten by both sides in the lesser nation.

The more divergent the culture of the lesser nation, the more violent can be the response, and the more active the embracing of the advanced nation’s culture, technology and mores.

Now apply all this to a rapidly shrinking world, where communication and travel is nearly instantaneous.

Thus we have terrorism and war today in our own land. We, as the perhaps unintentional uplifters, are the primal cause of these things happening.

We are the intended recipients of those terror campaigns, but we are also the beneficiaries of a great influx of people from these other cultures and lands.

Yet to protect ourselves, we are the unwilling instigators of war among those who we had hoped to help, to change, and to make in our image.

Thus we are living in a real Uplift War.

A stable balance, where all the nations which participate will survive, is likely decades away. Think about our historical effect on Japan and China, for instance.

A fatal balance, where many nations die and imperialism emerges may happen much sooner, if we are not on guard against it.

Comments?